BACK IN TIME
During a speech at a symposium titled “The Growth of Constitutional Democracy and Its Challenges” held by the National Policy Foundation at NTU in 2006, Ma was already giving us a taste of his future policies as president, saying: “There is no urgency for amending the Constitution. What’s truly important is to observe and implement the Constitution,” meaning the ROC Constitution.
Earlier that year, he had warned Chen against writing a new Constitution.
During the more than two decades covered in this article, an increasing number of people in Taiwan have identified themselves as Taiwanese. Support for Taiwanese independence also rose, reaching 23.5 percent — the highest in 12 years — last year, while support for unification with China fell to 6.5 percent, the lowest in the same period. Support for the “status quo,” meanwhile, stood at 57.8 percent. These numbers highlight the fact that while the majority continues to support the “status quo,” Taiwanese identity and support for independence have increased, while Chinese identification and support for unification have both dropped.
Although there is no exact correlation between rising national identity and agreement with the proposition that cross-strait relations are between states, this phenomenon nevertheless shows that Ma’s attempts to return to an unreformed ROC Constitution go against popular sentiment and current reality. It is, in fact, a form of revisionism and a negation of more than two decades of gradual change.
“The Ma government seems to be stuck in pre-history and has not been part of Taiwan’s political evolution over the past three decades,” van der Wees said.
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